


The Only Things That We've Lost

by Likerealpeopledo



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: Gen, It's not even that sad, now with smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-17
Updated: 2014-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-25 04:26:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2608433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/pseuds/Likerealpeopledo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mindy and Danny and the Not-So-Vicious Cycle</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Disaster

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea where this came from and with tonight's very exciting news, please feel free to disregard its existence, but I had to get it out of my head.

Mindy can most usually classify her relationship with Danny as a vicious cycle but she is slowly arriving at the realization that it is she and Danny who are vicious, and the cycle is merely a victim of circumstance. Ironically, it always appears from the outside that he’s trying to protect her, but really, truly, he can only serve to wreck her. He’s just always managing to do it from the inside, out.

This time, this last disaster, she could see it coming, and really, she could always see the various threats looming, she just never really tried to stop them. Truthfully, she isn’t sure that she even wanted to. It made more sense at the time to let it happen and suffer the consequences later.

And truly, the worst thing that he'd ever done to her wasn’t even the worst thing anyone had ever done to her.  Danny's wrongs just had a way of always feeling like the most heinous kinds of betrayal, because no one knew her like he did, and yet, he still did whatever it was he shouldn’t have done. He should have known better. He did know better.  And with this last incident, she was pretty sure it was all her fault, anyway. 

After it happens, she stops going to work for a few days, which turns into more.  Accidentally.  She hides pictures of them as a couple, even the ones where she looks most bangable, because she just can't bring herself to see his face yet.  Mindy couldn't look at him anymore. His eyes and his lips and his lashes never ever give her a reprieve. _Look at what you used to have_.

She wants to be surprised when Danny appears in her apartment, after a week of absolutely no contact and a bloodless, yet horrific catastrophe of a relationship ruiner.  He's clearly invoking Spare Key Privileges: The spare key he carries for all the times that she’s locked herself out, or for letting himself in when she’s already asleep and he’s getting back from a late surgery, because that’s what you do when you’ve dated for over a year, you exchange keys. He gets shared custody of your locks.

"Mindy?" He calls out, apprehensive, like he’s half, maybe three-fourths, expecting to find her dangling from a light fixture, and not sitting listlessly on her bed, staring at him with her mouth gaping open. "Hey."  He says it softly, clearly relieved.

"Hey yourself." She wants to be embarrassed that she’s sitting in a pile of magazines and half eaten junk food and she hasn’t seen the inside of her shower in days. She wants to be embarrassed, or any emotion except for the ones that she is,  but instead she shrugs at him. "Should you just be letting yourself in?"

"Should you be answering your texts and voicemails?"  He challenges, his brows elevating to his hairline.   He's giving her a tone; a tone she deserves but doesn't particularly feel warmly toward.

She’d turned the phone off, because she didn’t want to find out that no one was calling at all. "I turned it off."

"We thought you were dead."  He gives her a once over, and he tries to cover the fact that he sniffs the air. "You’re a little gamey."

"Shut up, Danny, I’m living my best life."

"Yes, that is abundantly clear. Could you maybe take a break from that so you could shower? Or brush your teeth?"

"Stop trying to take care of me, I don’t need you to take care of me." She feels petulant, and she knows she’s acting it. This fucking guy, with his stupid chin dimple and the slouch of his shoulders, acting all casual and knowing.

"I know." His face doesn’t really move, but he sounds a little more defeated than angry. Putting her back together is a specialty of Danny's but it doesn't seem like it should be his job currently.   "Doesn’t keep me from wanting to, though." In the middle of her bedroom, he seems forlorn and out of place.  He's a hologram of her former life and it's possible that he's an apparition or a delusion, from poor nutrition and poorer sleep patterns of late.  She doesn't know what to do with his admission, so she ignores it.  "Sooooo, what have you been up to?"  He asks, aggressively casual.  She wonders if it's possible to shove casual up someone's nose.

"I was too sad to sleep so I binge watched 71 episodes of Ally McBeal. For the record, I am not bringing that show with me into my well days.  What a weirdo."

"Is that one with the stick figure in the super short skirts who was obsessed with a ghost baby?"

Mindy doesn't have the energy to disagree, "That's it exactly."  He's still in the center of the room, the center of her universe, rocking back on his heels and looking vaguely nauseous, never really meeting her eyes.  Since he refuses to speak again without prompting, she blurts out, "Danny, I’m gonna need you to give me back my secrets."

"What?" His head snaps up, like he’s been super interested in the pile of Kleenex forming a mini mucus mountain on her bedroom floor and this sentence brings him out of his trance. "Give me back the stuff you know about me. I’m tired of being an open book to you."

"Come on Mindy."  He rolls his eyes at her, his hands shoved into his pockets.  "Don't be like this."  He pauses, "Plus, that’s just you. You’re constantly on audio. Announcing your chapters and your plot changes and your, your epilogues." Danny is clearly unprepared to go on a metaphor spree, but he does an okay job, in the heat of the moment.

"Well stop memorizing it. Some people just skim the pages."  She hopes that she is giving him the crossest expression she is capable of, pinched and mannered and a little menacing.

"Maybe I don't want to skim the pages. Maybe there's something in there worth savoring." Fuck. He’s too good with words. And with his face. She’d like to dig her thumbs right into his eye sockets, just out of spite that he’s so good with all that stuff, and yet so terrible with so much else. _Shit, Danny._ He shrugs. "You're worth slowing down to enjoy, just so you know." He kicks at something on her floor, maybe something that started to move, because God knows she hadn’t cleaned in weeks.   "You have to get cleaned up and get back to your life."

"I’m not sure which life you’re referring to."  She's watched _Gone with the Wind_ on at least six occasions in the last week, and she likes to think that she's picked up a little bit of the Scarlett O'Hara stubborn resolve in the meantime.

"Work? Your friends? Committing petty crimes?"  A flicker of apprehension crosses his face, but he seems to manage to ignore it, and she knows him well enough to know he's looking for other words, "Whatever it is that you want to do, Mindy. You have to go back to doing it."

"If it were that easy, Danny."

"It is. Just decide to get out of bed and then…get out of bed."  He makes a _get up and go_ gesture, waving his hand in the air between them.

"What is your understanding of how mental health works exactly?"

He grimaces, as if _mental health_ is the dirtiest phrase to fall upon his virgin ears. "Please. Everybody’s worried about you."

"Are you?"

"Of course I am."

"Well, you can stop. Because I am doing great."

"You don’t seem great. Unless there is a new definition of that word that I was not informed of until this very minute." Some portion of her temporal lobe betrays her, and flashes to Danny, naked in her bed. He’s a little sweaty, and her hair is sticking to his chest, and his hands are everywhere, all at once, like he has six of them, and four of them really, really like her butt. She blocks it, closing her eyes, as if that assuages anything that happens inside her head.  "Closing your eyes won't make me disappear, Mindy."  _Damnit, Danny_.

Any sense of nostalgia shatters when he sits on the edge of her bed.

"Well, it’s been great seeing you, Danny, but you have to go now."  She's really squeezing her eyes shut now, but it only serves to make her more vulnerable. 

"I can’t go until I know you’re going to get out of bed today." Mindy pushes him, using all of her upper body strength, but succeeds only in getting him to swing his torso so that he’s actually closer to her than further. _What is this madness_.

"I don’t understand why you are even here right now. I didn’t ask you to come, I didn’t ask for your help, I don't really think that it is a great idea that YOU are trying to help ME and your life isn’t any different if I sit here in my own filth for another three days or another week or if I don’t. It’s just not."

"That’s not true and you know it. Besides the obvious, I have to take on your patients when you’re not in the office. Morgan wants to tell me about his dogs when you’re not there. Peter asks me about dating if you’re gone. And then he complains when I don’t tell him what he thinks YOU would tell him. I can’t get inside the head of a mad woman, Mindy. I don’t know what goes on in there. You know damn well that it makes a difference to me if you’re around, or if you’re not."

"I am so sorry that people talk to you when I’m not there Danny. I know you have your manifestos to write and everything."

"I wrote one letter---"  He recognizes too late that she is making fun of him, "It’s not just about our co-workers wanting me to be their replacement Mindy, and you know it." His eyes become glued to her face, because she can tell he’s about to say something that isn’t a joke anymore, and she considers covering his mouth, because she knows that it’s going to propel her right back into the cycle previously known as vicious. "You know that I need you around."

If she asks him, _for what purpose?_ , he’ll answer her. She knows that he can’t leave anything hanging, because he is the king of tying loose ends, because he lived his whole life with so much unresolved that now he’s the antithesis of that. Maybe she’s read his book a time or two before.   Maybe she's savored a few of his pages.  "You think you need me, but really, you just… " There are at least a hundred ways to finish that sentence, but she can’t.

It's funny how many times they've danced this same dance.  She's all torn up, Danny swoops into comfort and/or rescue her.  She’s capsized so many times but this is the first occasion that he’s been playing the fiddle on deck while her ship goes down.

Danny flattens his hands against his knee caps, and she very much gets the impression that there are a million somewhere elses that he'd rather be, but he's here now, and he has things he wants to get out.  He gets very resigned in this manner, all business and hard lines.  "This is the strangest reaction I’ve ever gotten to asking someone to marry me, Mindy."

Well.  It took him twenty minutes but he finally got there.  Well, a week and twenty minutes.  Of course, with her phone turned off, a week, twenty minutes and about 78 unheard, unreturned voice mail messages and text messages.

"You understand why I freaked out, right?"

"No, not really." He rubs at his face, the lines in his forehead (she’s named them, _Christina, Annette, Alan, Mindy_ ) giving him the countenance of an adorably perplexed but well meaning turtle. "I mean, one hundred percent of my marriages end in divorce. Statistically, I’m fucked. It wasn’t all that easy for me to ask, you know."

"It wasn’t easy to say no, either."

"Nor was it easy to hear, oddly enough."

"This isn’t a contest, Castellano."  She punches at the air near his shoulder.

"A contest presumes there are winners and losers. I think we both lost." She examines him, all groomed and daisy fresh, handsome in a black v-neck sweater, no visible stains, and freshly pressed jeans. He smells like himself, soap and pine and something innately Danny, like she always pictured a real man smelled. He’s a real man who doesn't look like he's lost anything.  Which was her worry all along. He could be the same without her as he was with her. 

"How are you so chill right now?"

He pauses. "I’m not."

"You smell good."

"Good hygiene is vital to--- "

"Shut up, Danny." He becomes transfixed by his own knuckles. She always liked his hands. Surgeon’s hands, with long fingers and manicured (though he would never, ever admit it) nails. Always soft and strong. She knows how many moisturizers he owns and how they're implemented into his nightly rituals; she knows where his hands are trained to travel her body, what ground they enjoy traversing, their gravitational pull; she knows too much.  Mindy remembers where she is, and where his hands aren't,  "I lost my train of thought."

"We were ruining each other’s lives. In opposite ways, of course."  For the first time since he entered the apartment, he looks sad. 

"Oh, it must be a day that ends in Y!"

"I have never understood that phrase.  It makes no sense; they all end in Y."  And now he's back to annoyed.  Some things never change.

"I think that’s the point."

Danny puffs out his cheeks and makes a noise that is a cross between a groan and a sigh. "I’d really like for us to be able to come back from this."  He says this with the exact expression she's heard him use when he orders coffee.   She briefly wonders if he's self medicated in some way, just to keep himself steady.  Or if he's been this steady all along and she never noticed. 

"But don’t you always feel like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop?"

He wrinkles his nose, "No."  He looks less resolute, "A little....Sometimes."

"I know, right?"  They are the same in all the ways that they are different.  She starts to tell him her theory about Danny and Mindy and the Not-So-Vicious Cycle but stops herself. “If I had said yes…."

"I really, really wish you would have. Was it the proposal? It wasn’t _Mindy_ enough?"  He uses jazz hands to emphasize the _Mindy_ , as if she's a living embodiment of a cabaret show and nightclub act.

"No, it was perfect. Beautiful. Just a little screwed up. Just like you."

"Just like you." Danny moves closer to her and she can feel herself getting pulled into his whirling vortex of heat. It’s only a matter of time before she’s allowing him to envelop her, because it’s safe and warm and him. But not yet. 

To avoid staring too directly at his face, she chooses his temple, because nothing there looks back at her.  "I didn’t think I’d marry someone who already had this much grey hair."

"It’s in my eyebrows and my beard too, so watch out sister." Reflexively, she reaches for his thick, dark brow to inspect more closely, but she pauses mid-air. She’s been so good. Now her hand is poised above his face and they both watch it drop into her lap. The oxygen isn’t getting to her brain anymore. Damn lungs.

His shoulders droop.  She shouldn't have gotten his hopes up.  "I haven’t slept in days."

"You don’t look it."  He did, on second review, look it.   His face is more haggard around his eyes, and the tiny lines surrounding his mouth.  "Because of me?"

He glares at her, "No, because of my fantasy football team."

"Your players aren’t getting along?"

"Oh my God, Mindy, I’ve told you a million times. They aren’t actually playing together. It’s determined by points and the actual--." Danny shakes his head. "Don’t rile me up."

"Oh, like it’s hard." 

He switches tacks.  "Have you eaten?"

"Stop taking care of me, Danny. I ruined your life."

"I have faith that you'll have plenty of time to ruin my life later. Right now, I want to make sure that you’re not subsisting on sour straws and Pringles."  He stands up, wiping his palms on his jeans and surveying the apartment.

"Ice cream and Swedish Fish. But only because I ran out of the sour straws."

"You are an adult woman, Mindy. You cannot live like that."

"I'll have you know that my margaritas had lime in them. That’s fruit."

He reproduces the groan-sigh that is becoming a staple of the conversation. "Min."

"Dan," She parrots.  Logically, she knows that he's only trying to be sweet and kind and nice.  She is just not feeling terribly logical at the moment, unfortunately.

"Let me make you something with one USDA approved food group actually in it. Not the artificial flavoring of the food group."

"I don’t have anything approved by any government agency in the house. Actually, I think I have something that was banned by the FDA because they think it caused cancer in the lab rats and heart attacks in teenagers. But it tastes like cotton candy!  I kind of depended on you for the sustenance portion of the event."

"I don’t like it when you refer to me in the past tense."  Danny frowns, and her stomach clenches in fear.  She can't handle Disappointed Danny.  Not anymore than she can handle saying no to a marriage proposal that she practically begged him for on a weekly basis.

"In the pants tent?"

"Are you still drunk?" He calls behind him as he wanders into the kitchen, banging through cupboards and fridge, making more noise than truly necessary to toast some bread, because she knows that’s the only thing she has in the house that is edible. With Danny out of her immediate eyeline, she throws herself back into her pillows, pulling her coverlet over her head.  She counts to a hundred before she gives up and starts humming a One Direction song.  _This is excruciating._

The scuff of Danny's boots against her hardwood floors and his weight on her mattress announces his re-entry. She realizes that she can feel his body stretched out now; he’s gone from perching on the edge to lying next to her. She peeks out to see Danny reclining, arms behind his head, a plate of toast spread with fruit preserves (crusts cut off) resting on his flat abdomen. Seven days before, she’d fluttered a line of kisses down that muscular belly, down his pelvic bone, and into his underwear. Today, there’s pity toast in her place.  She burrows back into her cave of linens.

"You know, most people won’t let you reject their marriage proposal and then make you toast. With the crusts cut off." 

"I know." She mumbles through the layers of down.

"I don’t need a trophy or anything. I just thought I should point it out."

"I get it, Danny. You’re perfect. Everyone should aspire to be you."

"Grrgh….what do you want me to do here? I bought you a ring. I planned an elaborate proposal in your favorite location involving many moving parts that I coordinated VOLUNTARILY because I love you more than I have ever loved anyone or anything."  For as many minutes as Danny has remained calm since arriving, Mindy knew that a rant could not be far off.  And here it was,  "You’re already my family, but I wanted to make it official, you know? And you told me no. You hinted for months that it was what you wanted and you still said no. We’ve been dating for over a year, friends for a million, and you said no. I’m not sure what it is that you want from me."  Those surgeon's hands she'd been admiring wave wildly in the air over his head now, punching out his sentences with flourish.  There's a vein in his neck that emerges when they fight, and it's bobbing along with his head.  He turns his head to face her, everything about him too close to make any sense.

"Listen, I was as shocked as anyone."

"Not as surprised as the drum major." Danny smiles, but it fizzles out around his eyes.

"He was a little _too_ invested, if you ask me."

"Next time, I'll be sure to pre-screen the boundaries of the marching band."  He props himself up on an elbow,  "Min, there was a marching band! And you said no!" His skin flushes pink along his neck, and _chill_ is no longer a thing that Danny can be described as.

"I’m sorry, Danny." She picks at the toast still resting on his stomach, popping a corner in her mouth. "Does everyone know?"

"Deslaurier stopped me in the hallway yesterday and asked me how my feelings SOUND, so I’d say word is getting around."  He moves the saucer containing the toast slightly, and breaks off his own bit. "I’m not well trained enough to mimic a dying moose, so I abstained from the exercise. It was all I could do not to punch him smack in the kisser."  He makes a fist.

"Oh calm down, Kenickie."

"And besides that, our families and friends were all present for the debacle, thanks to my superb planning and coordination. I’m still angry at Morgan for cheering."

"He has weirdly always had it in for us." She licks some jam off her finger, "I think I got this stuff in a gifting suite at that pharmaceuticals conference we went to in Vermont last winter. It’s probably laced with Viagara."

Danny crosses his fingers and holds them up faux-expectantly. "It’s the only real fruit you have. Eat it. You’re developing rickets."

"You would diagnose me with an old timey disease." She tucks her knees up and rolls onto her side, curling toward him. Stupid magnetic forcefield Danny.

"Is it too soon to ask why you said no?"

"I’m not sure that timing is the biggest issue with that question."

He contemplates her for a moment, "Yeah, me neither."

"I think, part of it, was that it really was perfect. Too perfect. The last time I got asked that, I fell out of a tree and then had unrelated major surgery."

"So you would have said yes if I’d have pushed you off the Empire State Building after I asked?"

"Well, when you say it like _that_ ,"  Mindy screws up her face in thought,  "Yeah, I seem crazy, don’t I? I know, Danny, I’m crazy. Doesn’t make it any less true, though."

"I would have married you, you know. Unlike the last one that asked."

"What if you changed like he did?"

"Have I changed at all in the time that you’ve known me?"

"Yeah, a lot, actually."

"In the fundamental ways?"  Danny always told her that people don't really change, that they aren't capable of it, which was the number one reason he refused to allow any evidence to the contrary about his own father.

"Old Danny would be ladybugged out under his desk pantsless right now."

"So I managed to put on pants. I was coming here to try to win you back."

"You didn’t lose me."

"I lost you, Min. You’re gone."

"I’m right here."

"You told me you didn't want to marry me and then you ran off.  You ignored 78 text messages and voice mails.  I haven't seen or talked to you for a week.  Not to mention, you haven’t touched me the entire time I’ve been here."  Even at work, she could find at least a hundred different ways to touch him during the day.  Danny had always been great at the lower back hand grazes and the casual arm flicks, but Mindy had found in the course of a year of dating that she was just as good, if not a little better. 

"If I touch you, I can’t take it back."

"Take what back? The touching? Or the no? I’d rather you take back the no. Never touch me again if it means you say yes."   
He looks at her, runs his eyes up and down, taking in her rat's-nest hair, makeup-less face, old stretched out t-shirt that used to belong to him,  "Hey, that's my t-shirt."

"I spilled margs on mine.  Don't make it into symbolism or whatever. It was the only one that was clean.  Back when I cared that things were clean five days ago."

"Do you know how long it's been since I've gone seven days without seeing you or talking to you?"  Danny traces his finger along the seam of the quilt, his voice low.  "Not since Haiti."

"You could have written me a letter." 

"Why are you being like this?  Like this is okay with you?  Do you want to be broken up?"

"Did we break up?"

"Rejected proposals, traditionally, signal an end rather than a beginning.  To date."  Mindy realizes how wrong she was initially about Danny being the same with her as without her.  And she's known for seven days how wrong she was to say no to his wanting to marry her, hence all the wallowing, kvetching, and unclean living.  "Did we break up?" 

Mindy shakes her head, "I don't want to break up.  Not even a little.  I just thought that it was a foregone conclusion.  Once you leave a man standing on a rooftop holding a Tiffany diamond while your mother shouts, "Mindy, for the love of Vishnu, NOOOOO!" at you, you're pretty certain that your relationship, as you know it, is kaput."

"I can see where you'd be under that impression."  He nods, solemnly.  "Luckily for you, I'm not one to just blindly follow social norms."  Danny reaches for her hand, and everything that she's been trying to forget for the last seven days whooshes into her brain. She's grateful that she's dehydrated enough not to start sobbing, just at the relief that his hand is as soft and warm and fits exactly like she remembers.  That everything she knew didn't really change because she made a stupid mistake.  

"Danny, I really want to start over."  Mindy rubs her thumb across the back of his hand, over the tiny veins that protrude.  She loves the tiny veins.  "I really, really screwed up.  I got scared."  She kisses his hand, and Danny pushes a strand of hair back out of her eyes, "I thought that if I was getting everything I ever wanted, that it would all get messed up somehow, and then I'd have nothing at all instead of everything.  It's dumb.  It's so dumb.  But just, in that moment..."

Danny inhales deeply, still watching her very intently,  "I just need you to promise me that the next time I ask, that you won't run."

She nods. 

"Do you want me to run you a bath?  I'll wash your hair?" 

 She nods again. 

"Min, just so you know, there are zero minutes in the day when I’m sure if I should be kissing you or killing you.  It's pretty much always fifty-fifty."

"I like my odds."


	2. The Inevitable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danny washes Mindy's hair, and other pursuits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys aren't allowed to laugh at me, because I haven't written smut before and this is totally new and weird uncharted territory for me; I guarantee you, someone's body part will end up in a place that it has no business.
> 
> Thanks to smapdi for helping me out with beta and causing me to send the world's most awkward first email to a person I've never met.

Mindy brushes her teeth as Danny prepares the proffered bath and lights a line of stubby candles along the edge of the tub, not even mentioning that she shouldn't keep so many candles in a bathroom, it's a fire hazard, and what if that weird cat breaks in again and pushes one over when she's all relaxed and not paying attention---He has his list of worries, always, but he must be so blissfully relieved that they've talked and they've sort of resolved their previous disaster that he hums something to himself as he loads the steaming hot water with every potion and elixir that he can uncover in her bathroom.  She's positive that he's doing it just as much for his own benefit as hers, because she is _ripe_.  Having him in front of her, all worried and contrite and careful, makes her question why she didn't have him come over sooner.  He loves her, without sense or logic.  This is why they work. 

They work because Danny knows that the first decadent item she would ever purchase if she had truly unlimited (possibly untaxed) disposable income (after emojis and jewelry and ALL THE SHOES AND BAGS AND CLOTHES) is a personal hair stylist, namely, someone who would shampoo her hair regularly.  She told him of her shampoo girl fantasy on one of those early-in-the-relationship nights where you lay all tangled up in each other and giggle about stupid things that you never tell anyone but each other.  Every once in a while, when Danny is either really happy or really sorry (he really only has a few speeds, but either way, she benefits), he'll volunteer to wash her hair.  And because Danny does not voluntarily do things that he does not excel in, he, of course, furnishes her with fantastically languid scalp massages on a semi-regular basis.  He is a most adorable (although occasionally grumbly) shampoo girl, and free, to boot.

Mindy peels off her could-practically-stand-on-its-own t-shirt and yoga pants, and naked, wraps her arms around Danny's back, squeezing her hands over his pectoral muscles.  He grabs at her hand and brings it up to his lips, twisting in her arms, so that they're facing each other.  Danny is never comfortable with behind the back action, like he's an old school Mafioso.  He cannot have hugging from behind, he does not have the genetic make up for it.  She burrows her face into his arm pit, the place that she weirdly feels most comfortable, the place that smells like Danny's laundry detergent (mmm...Tide) and whatever sporty fragrance his deodorant provides (Woodsy Mountain Spring Tough Guy, maybe?).  

"Get in there," Danny whispers into her pre-dreadlocked hair, his voice low and throaty.  Her heartbeat quickens at his suddenly scratchy timbre, maybe because he'd held it together so well through the hardest parts, and she gets a weird thump when she thinks that he's not holding it together as well now.

He runs his hands down her bare back, his thumbs trailing down her rib cage, causing goose bumps to rise for every centimeter he travels.  "I missed you, Danny."

He kisses her nose, sweetly, and she rubs the tiny short hairs on the back of his neck, where he insists on having his soft curls cut off monthly, this time specifically against his genetic coding.  An enigma, this Danny Castellano, always to and fro on how a life should be lived.  She wants to kiss him more, to lead him back to the bedroom, but she knows that she stinks like she's been doing hot yoga while on a drinking binge and she really, really wants her head rubbed.  She'll rub his later.  It's been seven days, what's a few more minutes.

The sleeves of Danny's sweater are pushed up past his elbows, like he is scrubbing into surgery.  Mindy admires the same look of determination that he gets when he's about to perform an emergency caesarian section, or a complicated hysterectomy, when he seems so competent and sure, and steady, but it may be the exact opposite of how he feels.  She knows that their patients talk about the handsome doctor from Staten, (not the handsome British one or the fratty one) and how they hope their fallopian tubes measure up to whatever standard he would hold them to, and how nervous she used to get that she measured up, for him.  She knows now that the only way he measures is by her happiness, not even by his own.  It gives her another pang, the feeling that she's damaging him in some way, just by her previous hesitation. 

She pulls away from him, not all that eagerly, and her body slices between the cloud of aromatic bubbles already waiting in the steaming tub.  Danny settles behind her, as she leans back, ready to receive her completely undeserved reward.  

Danny doesn't speak as he goes about his ministrations, wetting her hair, deftly removing the tangles as he works.  Mindy closes her eyes, relaxing against the covered inflatable pillow that Danny located somewhere deep in her vanity, probably left over from a gift basket or cosmetics purchase somewhere. 

"You shouldn't be so good at this, Danny.  I might not let you leave."

"I'm counting on it, Min."   He presses his thumbs deeper into the crown of her head, rubbing in concentric circles.  She practically pants in reply.

Danny rinses the shampoo with her hand held shower head, tugging gently on the strands.  His short fingernails scratch at her scalp, and she can feel all the tension drain out of her body with each movement.  The muscles in her shoulders and neck go from coiled to slack within moments, and Danny taps the side of her arm when he's finished, as if he's waking her gently from sleep. 

Helping her out of the tub, he wraps her in her fluffiest towel, the one she stole from the Four Seasons in Los Angeles, as a memento from the time they stayed there during yet another medical conference.  Neither Mindy nor Danny have had the heart to tell Jeremy that they've been volunteering to attend as many conferences as possible just so they can stay in and christen various five star hotels on the dime of the practice, but Jeremy may have already suspected. (The itemized list of their Pay Per View in room movies may have tipped him off, but Mindy really, really wanted to expense those.  Under, _Research._ )

He's doing that thing where he's looking _through_ her, his eyes saying all kinds of words that his mouth never will, his lips pillowy and dramatic against the back drop of his tired, but still ridiculously handsome face.  She doesn't like how far apart they still are, even though it's inches, so she steps closer.  Danny only has to lick his lips, his tongue darting out briefly, before Mindy lunges at him, her hands cupping his face, her towel dropping to the wet bathroom floor.   She doesn't realize until later that she's saying his name, over and over, Danny, Danny, Danny, like he's resurrected from the dead. 

It's unfair, downright criminal, that he's still fully clothed, so she yanks at his black sweater, and hoists it over his head, missing his mouth more in those point five seconds than she has in the whole of the last seven days (that's a lie; she's deathly missed all of him, and most of all everything that comes along with his perfect and skilled tongue and lips), and consoles herself briefly by unbuttoning his jeans.  She unleashes the erection that had previously strained against the slit of his boxer briefs, and Danny manages to wrestle himself out of his pants and underwear, kicking them off as Mindy steers him toward the bedroom.  Their teeth knock against each other as his hands rove over her breasts, and hers over the honed definition of his abdomen. 

Danny kisses just like he rants--fast and hard and eternally concerned about winning, because he's Danny. She can't believe she's gone seven days without her tongue in his mouth, or his hands anywhere at all.  Not since their ill timed be cool break, which she now swears she will never ever bring up again, because she's pretty sure her worst thing trumps his worst thing now.  Danny topples backward onto the bed, gracelessly, Mindy astride him, her wet hair dripping onto his newly bared chest and neck. 

He hums a little into her mouth, his hands still kneading at her breasts, then, as if remembering their home turf, slipping back toward her ass.  He clutches at her, his tongue still tasting sweet like the Vermont Viagra jam, and hers newly minty.  Danny's managed to land some fairly monumental kisses on her in his day (airplane, hello?) but this one seems deeper, sweeter, more acute, more full of emotion than others have been.  Somehow they manage to shift, so that Danny's on top of Mindy, his dark eyes inky with need and want and _demand_ and she remembers what it's like to never have him, and it is not the same as having him and losing him.  It's so much worse to lose him.  Mindy curls her back and offers herself to Danny, her knees bent and spreading apart.  He's at home there, in that divot, the space between her legs; he fits.  She admires the crest of his sinewy shoulders and that muscle she should know the name of that runs in a slope between them.  She wants to lick the slope, but she's pinned down by Danny's strong arms, and his already heady breathing.

Danny's lips are hot against her still warm skin, chasing a line down to the top of her pubic bone.  He runs his tongue beneath her belly button, skimming what feels like the outline of the infinity symbol there, as he sinks first one finger, then a second into her.  Her feet arch against the cords of his finely muscled back and he steadies her hips with his other hand, digging his fingers into her flesh, applying enough pressure that she's sure to find their imprint later. 

Mindy squirms slightly as his tongue plunges against her clitoris, flat and slow, then faster, and then slower, and a sound not unlike a purr rises from the back of her throat.  It's like Danny is trying to unearth something inside of her, with the movements of his tongue, maybe he's reaching for something beautiful that's buried there and needs uncovered---she sighs, "Indiana Jones," and Danny pauses, his eyebrows knit together in confusion and a little bit of amusement.  She pulls on his hair, encouraging him to return to his previous location, and the tiny breath he takes before returning sends pulses of radiant energy throughout all her limbs.  She rocks her hips slowly against his curved fingers and gasps for air as he finds the right leverage on her clit with his tongue simultaneously.  "Hoooooolllllyyyy fuck."  

She can feel him smile, all of her nerve endings sizzling, and fuck this guy for not coming over on day 5 of radio silence instead of day 7.  Mindy comes, her hips undulating with release, her breaths not quite synchronizing with her lungs.  She's blacked out a little from the sheer force of her enjoyment, when she hears Danny's voice whispering from what seems like very far away, "It's my turn now,"  and he runs his mouth up the column of her throat. 

"Oh fuck yes." 

"You work very blue in the bedroom," Danny murmurs against her earlobe, as he eases himself into her, and she thrusts her hips downward to take him all the way inside.  A bit of old fashioned wrestling takes place and Mindy ends up back on top, squeezing her knees against his ribcage as she tenses her Kegel muscles around his dick.  Danny's eyes roll back a little in his head and she gets an odd puff of satisfaction in her chest that she's been able to do this for him.  "Oh, fuck, Min,"  But it doesn't really come out in English, or a truly recognizable language, but she knows underneath that is what it is he's saying.  She rocks back and forth, tilting and shimmying, kissing his chest and flicking at his nipples with her tongue.  Danny props her up with his knees as she arches her back, writhing and bucking her hips for maximum effect. 

She has this strange compulsion to recite all the feelings she's ever had for him: hatred, distaste, pity, lust, longing, intense longing, admiration, love; of course, love, over and over but instead she collapses on top of his chest, her freshly washed and still wet hair splayed over his neck and pillow.  Danny's hands caress her back, and he murmurs into her ear, "Are you okay, babe?  Mindy?"  It's English again, so she's taken him a little bit out of his happy place, where actual words don't exist.  

"I am fucking fantastic."

Danny wraps his hand into her hair, pulling just enough to move her face back into his eye line.  "Yeah, you are."

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Also, I'm creativelapses on tumblr. So what up.


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